Debate contribution: Legacy Cases: Irish Government

Debate contribution by Mr Doug Beattie MC on 19 May 2026.

MLA: Mr Doug Beattie MC
Party at the time: Ulster Unionist Party
Date: 19 May 2026
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Private Members' Business
Heading: Legacy Cases: Irish Government
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5550261

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Legacy is a running sore in Northern Ireland and further afield. I know that all of us in the Chamber will look at legacy through a different prism, and that is fine. The substance of the motion is similar to that of one that I brought to the Chamber in March of last year about the Dublin Government failing to live up to their responsibilities. That motion received unanimous support. Nothing about that premise has changed. The situation is exactly the same now as I said that it was in March of last year. Today's motion and our amendment, which clarifies a number of points in the motion and makes it a little more coherent, can be broken down into four areas. I hope that I can get through all four. I will try to do so. The first area, which Mr Frew articulated well, is that the Irish Government have failed to do anything substantial on legacy. They have done nothing for victims, nothing for survivors and nothing for society. They have brought in a legacy unit in an Garda Síochána, but let me be absolutely clear: it will not investigate anything. It will pass information to the UK investigatory bodies, but let us talk about that information: it will be redacted before investigation. It is important to remember that. The UK Government will not redact information before an investigation but will redact it when family reports come out for reasons of national security. That is fine, although Members may argue that they do not like that either. We are, however, literally talking about the Irish Government, the Irish Army, the Directorate of Military Intelligence, an Garda Síochána and the rest of the state security apparatus redacting information before investigation. That is not right, and we know that it is not right. The Irish Government are not doing investigations. Last week was the anniversary of the kidnap, torture and murder of Robert Nairac GC. He has had no article 2 investigation and no inquest. When I raise that with the Irish Government, they say, "We haven't found a body yet, so we can't do it". That is nonsense, because Irish legislation clearly states that they can hold an investigation and an inquest in cases in which there is no body. Corporal James Elliott was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1972, and there has been no article 2 investigation of his murder, even though he was murdered in Ireland. There has been no investigation, yet nobody is screaming and shouting about that. Two people were arrested, but do you know what they were arrested for? They were arrested not for his murder but for planting improvised explosive devices on his body. Nobody has been arrested for his murder. The Irish Government have supported amnesties. They supported amnesties in the Stormont House Agreement. We all know that the Stormont House Agreement would never have conducted investigations of those who were kidnapped in the UK, taken across the border and tortured and murdered. That was not part of the Stormont House Agreement. Nor would the desktop reviews by the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) have been part of the Stormont House Agreement. If someone had been left limbless, blind, burned and in a wheelchair, the Stormont House Agreement states that they would not have got an investigation. Some may not call that an amnesty, but I call it an amnesty. I will focus on what the Irish Government said. In 2014, Michael McDowell, who had been the Minister for Justice, made it clear that the Irish Government had made a conscious decision not to investigate actions from the Troubles once the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement was agreed. He said again in 2021 that that was the case. The Irish Government therefore clearly admitted that they had given amnesties and would not conduct investigations. When we talk about the Irish Government, we have to remember that the vast majority of attacks along the border and elsewhere came from the sovereign territory of Ireland, with people coming into the UK to murder UK citizens and then going back to Ireland, which they saw as a safe haven.
For the Irish Government to say, "Nothing to do with me, guv" is fundamentally wrong. Nobody should be saying that. Even if you disagree with me and the premise of what I say, you must agree that the Irish Government should live up to their responsibilities on legacy. That is why I believe that the UK Government have a case that could and should lead them to initiating an interstate case against the Irish, who have done absolutely nothing on legacy. We have to agree on that: they have not done anything on legacy. I have a fundamental problem with the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), not because of the latest report that referred to its management and how it worked. It is looking at something like 300 cases at present, so it is working, but there are problems with it. I remind everybody that the ICRIR was set up in such a way that there would be no prosecutions at the end of it. However, under the Labour Government's Troubles Bill, the ICRIR will become the Legacy Commission. It will transform into that, and it will have prosecutions at the end of it. I fully accept people saying, "I don't like the new legacy Bill", but the ICRIR, which will transform into the Legacy Commission, is working on about 300 cases. I believe that the first report should be out at the end of this month or, certainly, by the middle of next month. We in the Ulster Unionist Party have been trying to shape the Labour Government's Troubles Bill. We have tabled amendments on the definition of a victim; the addition of sex-related crime as a named harm, which we have debated here and on which there is cross-party support; the disqualification of anyone with terrorist affiliations from sitting on the victims and survivors advisory group or any other legacy body; and the need to make sure that acts that were lawfully performed by members of the armed forces will not be deemed as unlawful. That is how we are trying to shape the Bill. To everybody who says, "Let's get rid of Labour's legacy Bill", my question is, "What would you replace it with right now?". At the end of the day, we might say, "Let's get rid of it", but, at this moment, we are trying to shape it in order to make it workable. If it is not workable, I will be happy to join the chorus and say, "I'm not going to support that". However, we are not there at this moment. Other parts of the Bill are a little more contentious, such as the protections for military veterans. There are a number of protections in the Bill for military veterans, but let us be absolutely clear that the Government have lied about those. The protections are not just for military veterans; they are for everybody. There will be protections for terrorists in the same way as there will be protections for veterans. For me, that creates an equivalence that I cannot live with, and that is why we are aiming to change it. That is an important point for us to really drive home. It is hard to explain it to people, but the bottom line is that soldiers will have made mistakes — I absolutely accept that — but will have thought that they were acting in the right way when they made mistakes. There will be soldiers who made mistakes and knew that they were making mistakes and that they were doing wrong: if they did so, it is absolutely right that they should be pursued through the courts and the justice system. I will finish on the Dillon finding, which, I think, was raised as a Matter of the Day. We certainly debated it, and I do not want to go over old ground. However, I have a genuine concern that both the Human Rights Commission and the Equality Commission took a partisan view on the Dillon lawsuit, and that goes outside of what they were set up to do. To that end — you may or may not support me on this — it is worth having a review of both organisations. Where do we come to at the end of what I have talked about? It is this simple: we need to make sure that we have a mechanism that can be supported by the majority of victims, the majority of survivors and most of society.
It will not get everybody's support; that is just a fact. Therefore, we have to make it as good as we possibly can. However, the one thing that we can all stand up and agree on, no matter what corner of the House we stand in, is that the Irish Government have not lived up to their responsibilities. They have not done their duty. We need the First Minister and the deputy First Minister to call on them to start acting on legacy, because they have not been doing so.

1,537 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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